Why Does Every City Look The Same?

The local shop survives so long as the local community consciously chooses to keep it in business.

The transition starts when the shop’s owner and/or the community decides - actively or passively - that the shop isn’t essential anymore.

It’s a vacuum, and non-local business, typically a national or even global entity, has been built up to have more money, more brand recognition, more processes, controls, and procedures, just to fill voids exactly like this.

And, the national chain is built to be connected nationally, not locally.

These shifts happen, one at a time, and work together to slowly chip away at the local flavor.

It’s not just shops either, we see the same pattern in radio stations with identical playlists, malls with identical stores, and local sports teams whose fate will live and die by access to national media rights deals.

It’s the nature of competition.

Like competes against like.

Different, when it has an advantage, consumes different.

Different, when it is disadvantaged, is consumed by different.

If you’re wondering about community identity and authenticity, ask “Who cares?”

You can’t force caring.

You can only create space to foster caring.

And that starts with making stuff, locally.

Every business, every form of entertainment, every service, and even every transactional sales provider, can choose to optimize locally first.

You win people over by making stuff people feel connected to caring about.

We are losing the preservation game, you can see it on every High Street in every city and every Main Street in every town.

The local can’t beat the national directly, i.e. on profitability or scalability, but it can beat the national locally, i.e. by giving a local community something it wants, needs, or strongly desires over anything a national chain will offer.

You’ll see this theme everywhere—and if you’re really paying attention, you’ll see the massive opportunity to shift local right now.

You can’t force communities to care, but we can pro-actively foster more caring communities.

ps. If you didn’t hear Roger Mitchell and Jason Buck on Just Press Record yet, this whole idea is basically all we talked about from roughly a million different angles.